


Far From Any Roads

by puella_peanut



Category: Wonder Woman (2017), Wonder Woman - All Media Types
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Heartbreak
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-09
Updated: 2017-06-09
Packaged: 2018-11-11 11:46:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11147757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/puella_peanut/pseuds/puella_peanut
Summary: After everything is over, Diana sails across the sea to a town without a soldier, to a mother without a son; to a life filled with ghosts, and the war that haunts the world.





	Far From Any Roads

(For it is the watch that breathes, not him.)

 

Today, Diana closes her eyes.

.

.

.

London is cobbled stones scribbled damp below her footsteps, a pale wind as it bends the day to dusk before her weary eyes, and an echoing land stripped bare of war and soldiers named Steve Trevor. The city is somewhat less than empty, planeless skies arching over foggy brick and bone, and nothing more than the lingering gift of a man's cold watch huddled at a woman's warm lips.

Diana feels the clock stretch and pull the hours against her skin, ticks and tocks that walk between numbers marking a span of moments that were, that are still to be. Metallic heartbeats marching ever on without stopping.

Unlike him.

What little Diana knows of Steve is a weak and feeble thing set against all the life he lived before her and all the life he will not with her. Already, his voice has faded to a low murmur in her ears, whispers that tilt and slip her thoughts from now to yesterday, some handful of time trickling away beyond the confines of numbers, the markings of days.

Ghosts with blue eyes haunting only the mechanics of a weary mind.

Diana is a warrior, a fighter; an Amazonian princess born on the breath of gods and the rolling sands of lands without maps—but she is also a woman, and when the tears come, she dissolves into them without shame, for sadness swollen beyond the confines of an aching heart is nothing to be afraid of.

(Because fear should be only for battle, for the great agony people cause one another, for the feeble pastime of peace—and for men who will never return to fill the lives they left behind.)

She exhales, fog clouds then clears, sweeping the case dry, dusting the cobwebs of his once ownership away. Her fingers catch onto the glass, foreign imprints on a familiar souvenir, yet stamping nothing more than smudges, blurred spots. It'll be wiped away, in time, like everything else.

Or not.

Recollection, much like warfare, Diana has learned and will learn, has a tendency of being borne back and back again; conflicts remain much the same, causalities as well. The ebb and flow of history never truly changes, only the faces do. The days will pass as will the decades—and centuries will dress themselves up and into the lives of others.

His wore a uniform, his father's watch; a laugh that curled into her ear, wartime bravery and defeat.

Hers wears the gift of time; empty spaces between her fingers—victory, memory, and a broken heart.

Life is a cruel mistress, but time is crueler still.

.

.

.

If Steve lives, Diana thinks some November evening under a sky sparked with celebrations and fireworks and the triumph of those who survived—he lives now only in her memories—and those are journeys cast of questions from far away, to answers more far away still.

Like the letter she will eventually send across miles long.

Like the reply she will eventually receive across miles longer still.

But for now, she is simply a woman and it is the end of a war and there is a watch that has one less life to tick for.

.

.

.

A suitcase is not a new concept, but visits across the sea are.

Diana folds away the fabric of her life down tight the night before departure, a print run of _London Times_ rounding out the spare corners, and the letter from Steve Trevor's mother in her pocket anchoring her resolution. The paper's been folded down flat, writing several weeks old still smudged like a low tide of ink under her fingertips, words a tempest in her mouth—just one ticket to the past waiting to set sail in her pocket tomorrow.

She has to sit on the top of the battered case to make sure everything stays put, doesn't spill out the sides.

.

.

.

The morning of departure, Etta apologizes profusely—the ship is not much more than a rusty bucket full of holes as it was on such sort notice—but she smiles when Diana does and whispers, voice bent and carrying pain like a sharp knapsack on its tone, _I miss him as well,_ Diana.

The ocean is old, the people new; the languages foreign, but the departure familiar, and Diana waves with the rest of them from the top deck as the ship sails to another sea, the start of a journey that begun with a goodbye.

.

.

.

Traveling back to his home, Diana witnesses mankind ravel and unravel from the spool of living.

There are men and women and children, soldiers and wives and immigrants on board. Fathers and teachers and babies and sailors. Invalids and nurses and orphans with wide eyes that stretch across the ocean to a tomorrow they hold in their hearts of today. So many shapes of life, so many different hours of living. Beginnings, middles and ends and sometimes Diana doesn't know where she stands, only where Steve stands no longer.

(Railings are rusted and push blisters under her palms and into her bones, there's too much grey and too little blue and everything Diana breathes here is damp with water and tinged with salt—much like her life, nowadays.)

Still, time goes on.

The men here are broken, Diana observes daily, shipped back to their homes in parts off the assembly line of war. Their gazes rarely meet hers, locked in endless combat with a past that is unconquerable. They limp and hobble around, uneven in their gait from the tossed sea and the limbs that have abandoned their bodies for the pursuit of war. Nurses wait upon them, wheeling them about; small hands for large duties, many hours and their double in patience. And there are always children, children everywhere.

Some of the men will not live, and these Diana bids farewell to over and over as the waves roll them under and the sea sings them to sleep. Some of them will or nearly enough; smiles creaking like loose hinges in scarred faces and half-hearted chatter from voices dim and cracked.

Diana listens to them; to the men, the women, the children, old and young and in-between—to their stories, to their land, to the places they are going to and coming from and all the things they hope to be; she listens to this small piece of a larger world that Steve sacrificed himself for. They are the voices that will speak where his has been hushed, they are they people that will live where he will not.

She will defend them, flawed and strange and human as they are, for his sake. She will fight for them much the same. And she will love them, despite it all, they who manage to be their very best when things are at their very worst.

They were once his.

They will always be hers.

.

.

.

Everything and everyone here are constantly in motion, moving between the past and the present and the future; now and then, here and there. Wheelchairs squeak and heels click and footsteps scuttle, and Diana walks among them all; she speaks and thinks and tries to live again, and America, when she appears, stands lone and high and mighty thrust out from the sea with waves bowed reverently at her feet, walking her nation to the shore, a woman in weathered green, a gift of folded stone.

No sword, no shield—only a lantern thrust through the darkness of Diana's life.

The sea laps at the hull of the ship when Diana disembarks at emigration, home away from home, passport in her pocket. The directions to his town presented in several questions balanced on her lips. She's pointed out and shown where to go and whom to go with and on the second train ride, buildings diminish and fade and fold into the distance of journey; the skies growing wide, the people narrower and narrower until she's mostly alone, ghosts making for poor company and thoughts nipping her heels as the wheels chase her onwards towards his past, her future.

The wagon ride of that afternoon weaves bands of hay into her clothing like threads of gold, evening hitchhiking polite small-talk out of the bare, straggly land, dandelion clocks blown off to copper skies somewhere beyond the rim of the day, fuzzy and white; like stars and unlike them as well. Morning comes, one or two automobiles carry country air into Diana's lungs along with a carriage ride that jiggles and bumps her shoulders sore, and the last station-master of the very last train stamps her map on the nearest Tuesday of her trip and says _welcome home, Ma'am_ and tells her just where Steve's mother resides.

.

.

.

Two women have called Diana to his land: a mother of many crowned like a queen, a mother of one divested from her title by the war.

Diana steps forward, her footsteps marking the lonely dust, far from any roads she's known before. There's a sign with a peeling name upon it; several letters and not much else.

It's a small town.

But it's his.

.

.

.

The land is hard, his mother soft.

She is all fine lines and weather vane coarseness; brown-skinned farmer's daughter of the prairie lands. Patchwork laundry in her arms, dress faded from hard work and coarse sunshine, greeting freshly scrubbed up and ready for company nonetheless. She speaks with a lilt in her voice and a twang to her speech; they share a basket of aprons between them as she shows Diana inside, and she laughs when the wind carries the folds away, untucks them from their neatness.

"What can you do," his mother says, with Steve Trevor's hair and her own eyes, warm and patient and offered like a harvest, "the seasons will have their way. Now come inside, you must be so tired. It's been a long journey."

"Thank you. I am." Diana agrees. She has stood under sun, under rain; been a friend in foreign cities, a stranger in familiar eyes. She has walked among life and among death and among the shadowlands of the limbo between the two and—

Well.

It's the truth. More or less.

So it takes a moment for Diana to realize that it's not the wicker basket of daily chores pressing into her hand anymore, but the touch of a mother whose grief feels just as raw and chapped as splintered wood. Her hands have been worn down thin under hard-living and harder-times but her words are warm where Diana is cold.

"We all are, honey."

.

.

. 

Later on, Diana will remember the little things.

How the screen-door squeaked at the start of a turn, the roof that leaked when the rain blew over its sagging corners with all the spit of a storm. Rugs spun of corded thread and worn low by the plod of bare feet; the cat that hissed at her calves and purred in her lap, three white-footed paws and a black one with a limp. Tumbleweeds sweeping the endless fields of dust and dirt and evenings that leave the remains of sunsets behind her eyelids long after the day has gone to sleep and sorrow remains wide awake.

She will recall sitting down at evenings to homecooked suppers and plates that are more chipped than not, the only visitors to their shared abode tales from the past, his past. How his mother's honey-wheat eyes will blur, but never tip over again; her voice will tremble but remain unbowed. The stories will go on and on, past counted hours and there will be coffee and freshly buttered biscuits and four a.m smiles tinged with sadness before goodnight greets the dawn.

The town will be small and Diana will feel large; empty and echoing from all the places the war and gouged out of her, from all the places Steve will never fill.

In the days that will come, she will pedal to the small collection of stores and living that his house sits up at the tips of. Barest of population, flat lands and flatter buildings and people who all knew him, more or less. They won't have heard of her, this woman who walked through No Man's Land during the war and usurped a god from his throne—and they wouldn't half believe her if she'd told them. It'll start slow and small in starts and stops; polite smiles, nickle for a thimble, the familiar appearance of her hat brimming at the corner of their wondering eyes. The questions will come, curiosity lassoing an eventual acquaintance and his town will become hers and one day, someday, Diana will not hesitate to tell them, _yes—yes, I knew him too._

They'll tell Diana of him then, unfold and open up, different bits and pieces from a childhood and youth, different items from different folks to stock her empty larder of Steve's once-upon-life before her, before the war, this strange puzzle of a past that eventually led to a future—

—even all the ones that never were.

.

.

.

She'll have pictures playing in her mind like a cinema come one day, collections of snapshots in the album of her mind. Moving memories to be thumbed to and opened up at will, of little yellow-haired boys who stuck their fingers into penny-candy jars when they thought no one was looking; sticky hands punished with a teacher's ruler and bruised by schoolyard roughhousing; calluses from part time jobs and treasure hunting in the soil for the gold that never could be discovered. A child, all skinned knees and torn elbows, who thought he could fly if he jumped high enough off barn-kept haystacks, arms stuck out like planes before the prairie long and gold and endless. There will come stories of stolen pies and school socials and a gramophone that had to be kickstarted by a well aimed boot. She'll hear the bones that creak with the responsibility of growing up and feel the wish of wanting something better; little boys now grown to men with dreams as high as the stars in towns too small to contain the sheer width of their longing.

Diana will keep them all and look at them from time to time, even when Steve's voice fades and some of the pictures slip from their frames and the short time they had together grows dim under the weight of the years; she'll keep them even when the tears stop and and the aching ceases and the rawness is peeled to puckered scars leading along the lines of her heart to a hurt that will soften but never quite fade.

.

.

.

She'll get there, someday. One day. They all will, some more than others, some less. But they'll get there.

People always do.

So for now—for now she simply waits and listens and heals.

.

.

.

But for now, it is the first night, the hardest night, and Diana spends it in Steve's room.

The wallpaper is arched backwards from the pine, curling into gardens of printed flowers, the bedspread faded from years of slumber and a childhood hushed to corners where little boys once kicked up their heels and soared their imaginations to the very brink of ambition and then some.

Steve’s mother apologizes that first night, says it’s not much—

—but Diana simply takes her hand in hers, squeezes the fingers that still reach for a missing son and in their way, will always and replies that _no, it is._

At midnight she wears the soft nightgown Etta gave to her, hair unpinned from the day and a tired body that slips under a warm quilt. There is a trunk at the tip of the bed, dressing-table near the door, a desk under the window with a matching chair, green cushion much worn down. A cupful of pencils draws silver from the moon to their shining lead; fountain pen and spare paper remain hushed and waiting for all the correspondence that will never be sent, letters mailed to no one, now. 

The only thing missing is him.

And spare threads tickle Diana's fingertips to the learned pattern of insomnia as they wander the restless hours, moonlight bright at the tips of her eyes, dreams just beyond reach.

Steve Trevor farther still.

.

.

.

In the morning she and his mother will cry just once and talk many times, and Diana will get to know the boy after she knew the man; see this small town after she saw the world. She will stay, for how long she does not know, but it will be a long time yet. Treaties will be signed and countries divided and there will be empty seats at empty tables forever including their own. People will live and people will die and the seasons will alter their colors before her eyes. Things will change and some things will remain the same and the world will go on for better and for worse and Diana will stay on here in this town, with this mother of none as long as she is needed and then some.

.

.

.

And someday, when she eventually departs, the watch will be tucked away in an unused drawer of the dressing-table, ticking time away in the corner of darkness until it falls asleep, forever resting in the quietness of wood, somewhere between life and death. Memory and goodbye.

Sons and mothers, women and war. What did not come of them.

And what did.

.

.

.           

(For it is her that breathes, not him.)

Today, Diana opens her eyes.


End file.
